We invite you to come for a coffee and listen to the invited artists who will discuss their work, research and ongoing projects with the Rencontres Internationales programming team. This is an informal and ideal opportunity to address the work of the artists in the programme before the screening.

Rencontres Internationales continues with its Focus series, initiated in 2016, inviting the audience to discover, during a dedicated one-hour session, the work and specific research of an artist or an exhibition curator. The guest defines the course of each focus.

For the first Focus in Berlin, we have invited the artist and filmmaker Ariane Michel.

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The artist and filmmaker Ariane Michel was born in 1973 in Paris and currently lives in Esquibien. After studying at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs (Paris) and a stint at the Pavillon – a research cell at the Palais de Tokyo, Ariane Michel has created work in which the narrative techniques of cinema play an important role, inscribing them in her videos, installation devices, film or performances. Whether her project The Screening —a mirror projection in a forest, her feature film Les Hommes, or her aquarium Les Lutétiens which creates an encounter in a cinemascope format between living people and a fossilised setting, they all explore the same concern: through immersion, projection and montage, to provide those who approach them with an experience that distorts their senses.

Her works have been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art (New York); the Minsheng Art Museum in Shanghai; the Tate Modern in London; Art Basel (Switzerland); Aichi Triennale (Japan); in Paris during Nuits Blanches, the Jeu de Paume arts centre, the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Fondation d’Entreprise Ricard and in public areas in the metro, as well as in film festivals, including the FID Marseille (Grand Prix 2006), Locarno, Rotterdam, Vancouver and Lisbon festivals. Her film Les Hommes was released nationally in France in 2008 (Shellac distribution). Galerie Jousse Entreprise in Paris represents Ariane Michel.

Away From Here is a look at young people growing up in the strip malls, skate parks, back seats, and empty parking lots of the American suburban landscape. This film explores the chasm between childhood and adulthood. In this film a young girl describes a dream in which she can fly. The description of her dream is the basis for exploring the world she and her peers inhabit. This film is a meditation on the reality of dreaming.

Born Peoria, Il 1981
Justin Schmitz is an artist living and working in Chicago, Il USA.
He received a MFA from Yale University in 2013 and a BFA from Columbia College Chicago in 2004. He was awarded the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship by the Yale University School of Art and the Tierney Fellowship for Excellence in Photography by the Tierney Family Foundation. Justin is also the recipient of The City of Chicago Community Artist Assistance Program Grant, The Union Civic and Art League Scholarship, and The Albert P. Wiesman Scholarship. He was a finalist for the Honickman First Book Prize at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies and the Photography Book Now Prize. His work has been included in The Museum of Contemporary Photography’s Midwest Photography Project and the Indie Photo Book Library. Schmitz has exhibited throughout Chicago at Johalla Projects, Gardenfresh, Heaven Gallery, the Evanston Biennial, and Version Festival. His work as also been exhibited at M+B Gallery in Los Angeles, The Aperture Foundation in New York, and Les Rencontres Internationales New Cinema and Contemporary Art Festival in Paris and Berlin.

Julia Charlotte richter You Are the Center of the World

Fiction expérimentale | 4k | couleur | 16:45 | Allemagne | 2015

“And all, all, all was nice and good” is the last sentence sung by a chorus of middle aged men that opens “You are the Center of the World”.
A horse walks around, the hooves clatter in the courtyard of a pretty detached house. The three young men look around, wander through the deserted streets. Finally, they find themselves in a living room and remain in there. All they can do is wait and listen to the silence. Where are all the other people? Out there, something is wrong, for sure.
The small town becomes a stage for the three local teenagers, who are looked at by the camera and „act acting“. Explicitly cinematic visual references are created, where the characters move and perform in.

Julia Charlotte Richter (*1982 in Gießen, Germany) is a video artist. She studied Fine Art in Kassel (Germany), Portsmouth (UK) and Braunschweig (Germany). Julia Charlotte Richter’s works have been shown internationally in numerous screenings and exhibitions, including Museum Folkwang Essen, Manege Moscow, Georgian National Museum Tbilisi, Goethe Institute Chicago, Toronto, Ankara etc., Filmfestival “Max-Ophüls- Preis” Saarbrücken and the “B3 Biennial of the Moving Image” Frankfurt. She received different scholarships such as the residency “Young Art in Essen” (Kunstring Folkwang/Kunsthaus Essen) in 2012 or a working grant by the Stiftung Kunstfonds in 2014. Her film “You are the Center of the World” (2015) was funded by the Bösenberg-Foundation. In 2017 she received a project grant by the Kunststiftung NRW as well as a travel grant by the Hessische Kulturstiftung.

Mike crane Bunker Drama

Doc. expérimental | hdv | couleur | 30:0 | Lituanie | 2015

Buried deep underground in an abandoned Russian broadcasting station located in the forest of Vilnius, Lithuania, an actor performs the role of a Red Army General to teach free-market values to a group of unemployed teenagers by subjecting them to an antagonistic history lesson on the Soviet occupation of the Baltic States.

Mike Crane is an artist raised in Bogotá, Colombia and currently based in New York. He is a graduate of the Cooper Union School of Art and studied at Hunter CUNY. Previous exhibitions include The Bass Museum of Art (Miami), Center for Contemporary Art Derry (Northern Ireland), FridayExit (Austria), Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane (Ireland), Chashama (New York), Carnegie International Lending Library of Transformazium (Pittsburg), The Banff Centre (Canada), and Silent Green Kulturquartier (Berlin). His work was most recently exhibited at the Bronx Museum Biennial, the Berlinale Forum Expanded and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin. He was awarded the Brenda and Jamie Mackie Fellowship for Visual Arts at the Banff Centre, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant for his film installation at Chetham`s Library in Manchester, UK. In 2015, Crane was an artist in residence at the Triangle Arts Association in Brooklyn and the Rupert Centre in Vilnius, Lithuania. He is a recipient of a 2015 Creative Capital visual arts grant and is an artist in residence at the 2016-2017 Smack Mellon studio program in Brooklyn, NY.

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Stéphanie Rollin and David Brognon film a young boy lining up glass marbles, providing a literal and applied measure of the passage of time. In Ghana, Eleonore de Montesquiou confronts images of young people with ambiguous discourse about aggression and the accountability of the victim. Justin Schmitz films teenagers in the blurry landscapes of American suburbs, and observes the tentative borderline between adolescence and adulthood. Julia Charlotte Richter follows three boys in the deserted streets of a residential city. They become the protagonists of a fictional scene, following a catastrophe. Mike Crane films a leisure centre located in a former Soviet building in Lithuania. An actor plays the role of a Red Army General, teaches his idle teenage audience about the values of a market economy, and gives them a history lesson about Soviet occupation in the Baltic States.

The Coat loosely adapts Aristophanes’ The Birds from the Athens of 414 BC to contemporary Calabria. Here the two people who leave their home looking for a better life are a young man and his daughter arriving from Albania in search of a swimming coach who fled the collapse of Communism in the 1990s. They search for the coach among Italy’s Arbëresh community, descendants of an earlier Albanian exodus of the 1450s. Along the way the pair intercept two actors touring the rural south in an attempt to resuscitate the long dead street hero Punchinella. Here histories are invoked only to be folded in on themselves and diffused back through the Calabrian landscape. The characters, naive to the terrain that surrounds them rely predominantly on cartographies of their own desire while the birds fly overhead taunting their imprudence. Co written with, and employing professional and amateur actors, The Coat‘s itinerant figures don’t so much drive narrative as walk it slowly along.

CORIN SWORN was born in London, England, and raised in Toronto. She studied psychology and integrated media before earning her master’s at the Glasgow School of Art. Sworn has exhibited internationally, including at the Whitechapel Gallery, Tate Britain, the National Gallery of Canada, and the 2013 Venice and Sydney Biennials. Her film work has appeared at Rotterdam Film Festival and the Centre Pompidou.
TONY ROMANO was born in Toronto and earned his B.F.A. from the Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design. His film installations have been exhibited internationally, with solo and group shows at MoMA, Night Gallery in Los Angeles, Articule in Montreal, Kulturhuset in Stockholm, and MOCCA and The Power Plant in Toronto.

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One summer evening in a rather tropical Japan, Elise Florenty and Marcel Türkowsky film several isolated people, caught in a game of more or less threatening shadows. Operators dressed in black seem to manipulate them as they abandon themselves to the idea of being puppets. Yet here, at most a few tears, or laughter muffled by a cry, tear the silence of the night apart. Corin Sworn and Tony Romano is a losose adaptation of Aristophanes’ play, ‘The Birds’, and transpose 5th century BC Athens to Italy, to contemporary Calabria. An Albanian man and his daughter arrive looking for a swimming instructor who fled communism in the 90s. This instructor is from the Arbëreshë community, Albanians who settled in southern Italy in the 15th century. Whilst looking, they encounter actors who are trying to revive a touring theatre. Each character charts a cartography of their own dreams, their stories intertwine, outlining a reflection on exile and immigration over the centuries.

Palestinian contemporary artist and filmmaker Shadi Habib Allah takes us with him on an unlikely journey of discovery – at gunpoint across the Sinai Peninsula, led by Bedouins who will force us across an unmapped terrain whose only signposts are the small stories they tell about the stakes of living, dying, and moving through this mysterious space. Stories, itineraries, directions, and allegiances become as blurred as the status of the Bedouins themselves, who remain unrecognized non citizens of this no man’s land, through which Habib Allah is led – behind the lines of military checkpoints, off the political, economic, and historical grid, a place where these desert outliers quietly continue their lineage with the help of snakes…

Born in Jerusalem, Palestine in 1977, Shadi Habib Allah received a BFA from Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in 2003 and an MFA from Columbia University in 2010. His practice ranges from film, sculpture and drawing to installation. While each projects defines its own terms based on research and physical engagement, a common thread is opening up suggestive modes of navigation across circulation networks of people, technologies, objects, images and economy to examine ideas of use and value and the structures that hold them in place.
He was twice awarded 2nd Prize for the Young Artist Award from the A.M. Qattan Foundation, and has attended residencies at Cittadelarte, Fondazione Pistoletto in Biella, Italy and Gasworks in London, England. He was nominated for the Luma Award 2011 and was the 2012 recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award. Habib Allah was a part of the fall residency program at Delfina Foundation in London, in October 2016.
Habib Allah’s work has been exhibited at the New Museum Triennial (2015); Art Statements, Art Basel 43 (2012); Palestine c/o Venice, Venice Biennale (2009); the Riwaq Biennale, Ramallah (2009); and In Focus, Tate Modern, London (2007), amongst others.
His Films have screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, Courtisane Festival Belgium, the 40th Norwegian Film Festival and 32nd Hamburg International Short Film Festival.
Recent exhibitions include:I can call this progress to halt, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), Los Angeles, CA (2017); Black Box Screenings O Solitude, Beursschouwburg, Brussels, Belgium (forthcoming 2017);Daga`a, Green Art Gallery, Dubai, UAE (2017); House of Commons, Portikus, Frankfurt/Main, Germany (2016),Biscuits and Green Sox Maaike, Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York, USA (2016)Shadi Habib Allah: 30KG Shine, Rodeo, London, UK (2015) The Verdant, Hacienda, Zurich, Switzerland (2015); Artists Space on Randall Island, Frieze Art Fair, New York, USA (2014); Empire State curated by Norman Rosenthal & Alex Gartenfeld, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome, Italy (2013) & Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris, France (2013); Frozen Lakes, Artists Space, New York, USA (2013);Nouvelles Vagues, curated by Jason Waite and Antonia Alampi, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France (2013).
Shadi Habib Allah lives and works in New York.

Miranda pennell The Host

Doc. expérimental | hdv | couleur et n&b | 60:0 | Royaume-Uni | 2015

A filmmaker turns forensic detective as she pieces together hundreds of photographs in search of what she believes to be a buried history, only to find herself inside the story she is researching. The Host investigates the activities of British Petroleum (BP) in Iran; a tale of power, imperial hubris and catastrophe. While the tectonic plates of geopolitical conspiracy shift in the background, the film asks us to look, and look again, at images produced by the oil company and personal photos taken by its British staff in Iran– including the filmmaker’s parents– not for what they show, but for what they betray. The Host is about the stories we tell about ourselves and others, the facts and fictions we live by - and their consequences.

Miranda Pennell originally trained in contemporary dance and later studied visual anthropology.Her short film and video works that explore performance and choreographies of the everyday, have been screened internationally including for broadcast. Her most recent moving-image work reworks colonial archives as the starting point for investigations into the colonial imaginary. Her film Why Colonel Bunny Was Killed (2010) was awarded best international film at the Images Festival, Toronto, and Courtisane Festival of Media Art, Ghent and is published on DVD by Filmarmalade. The Host (2015) is Pennell’s first feature length film. Selected screenings and exhibition of Pennell’s work includes mixed programs and group shows at Tate Britain (2014), Whitechapel Gallery (2015), Museum of Modern Art Vienna (2012), Kunsthaus Zurich (2015).

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Shadi Habib Allah films a drive through the no man’s land of the Sinai Peninsula, guarded by armed Bedouins. Everything seems to take place outside political, economic or historic frameworks. The only rule seems to be to remain invisible and intangible. Miranda Pennell pieces together hundreds of photographs, investigating the activities of British Petroleum in Iran, in search of what she believes to be buried history. She becomes involved in a tale of power, catastrophe and British imperial hubris. The tectonic plates of geopolitical conspiracy shift in the background, but the film asks us to look, and look again, at the images produced by the oil company and by its staff in Iran, including the filmmaker’s parents, not for what they show, but for what they betray. ‘The Host’ is a film about the stories we tell, the facts and fictions we live by and their consequences.

Short synopsis:
The subject of Aglaia Konrad’s 16mm films is modernist architecture but rather than a form of architecture on film, or film on architecture, her films investigate the potential for film to embody the experience of architecture as sculpture. The protagonist here is `La Scala`, a villa on Lake Garda, designed by Vittoriano Vigano for André Bloc in 1958.
The ‘multiple projection’ (split-screen) of La Scala proposes a multiplicity of perspectives and, more significantly, a succession of combined images.
Long synopsis:
Modernist architecture is the subject of Aglaia Konrad’s 16mm films but rather than – and beyond – a form of architecture on film, or film on architecture, what her films propose is an investigation into the potential for film to embody the experience of architecture as sculpture.
Working with the moving image offers Konrad, who is originally a photographer, the possibility of duration and, most importantly, that of editing – of constructing an accumulation of points of view and positions, which in her latest film La Scala is emphasized by the use of the split screen. A split screen which is reminiscent of the double screen projection in works such as River Yar by Chris Welsby and William Raban, a 1972 film which documents a landscape – a river estuary in the Isle of Wight – at the interstices between seasons and between night and day. The ‘multiple projection’ of La Scala proposes a multiplicity of perspectives and, more significantly, a succession of combined images. The combined shots often serve to emphasize each other. Konrad tends to pair images of the same space, shot from a slightly different perspective, in a slightly different light. Perhaps a slightly different moment of the day, a different exposure. Almost identical images function as a spatial jump cut, rather than a temporal one.
Perched on a cliff overlooking Lake Garda, La Scala is a Brutalist villa built in the late 1950s by Italian architect Vittorio Viganò. In spite of its pure, modernist lines and materials, La Scala is not a neutral architectural environment but one that highlights drama – hence the theatrical resonances of its name. Its most dramatic feature is the vertiginous concrete stairway that gives its name to both the house and the film (‘scala’ means ‘ladder’ in Italian). The film begins from the perspective of the lake and moves up, through the scala and into the house, where glass becomes predominant, and with glass, light. The film explodes into a kaleidoscope of reflections, multiplied by the double screen. Film attempting to capture light, and film as light.
In memory of sound engineer Gilles Laurent, who was working on the sound design and was killed in the Brussels bombs, Konrad has chosen for the film to remain silent. But silence is particularly befitting, allowing for the emphasis to be on space: the space filmed, the space of the screen, the space between the screens.

Aglaia Konrad (°1960, Salzburg) criss-crosses urban spaces. Her photographs, films and installations zoom in on exceptional buildings and the transformation of cities. She focuses on the way architecture is visualised and exhibited. Aglaia Konrad lives in Brussels and teaches at LUCA School of Arts. She had presented her work in solo exhibitions in Siegen, Antwerp, Geneva, Graz, Cologne and New York, among other cities, as well as in international group shows such as Documenta X (1997), Cities on the Move (1998-1999) and Talking Cities (2006). Her work has been documented in several exhibitions catalogues and monographic publications such as `Elasticity` (2002) and `Iconocity` (2005). For her book `Desert Cities` (2008) she received the Infinity award for the best photo book 2009 of the International Center for Photography, New York. The book `Carrara` (2011) won the Fernand Baudin Prize 2011. In 2016 she published `From A to K` (Buchhandlung Walther König).

The film is inspired by the once huge and luxurious hotels in the former Eastern Bloc designed in the 1970s and 80s. In the meantime their glamour is considered out of date and most of the hotels have been shut down, renovated or demolished.

Arianne Olthaar (1970, Netherlands) graduated as a painter from the Hagues’ Royal Academy of Art in 1992. She is making experimental films, photographs and miniature models. Her work has a strong focus on the once-luxurious interiors of public spaces, built in the 1970s and 80s (primate enclosures, dining cars, hotel nightclubs, discotheques, a school interior). Interiors that once represented an explicit modern luxury but nowadays have an aura of faded glory and are increasingly disappearing by renovation or demolishment.
Her work has been presented in a variety of exhibitions as well as numerous international film festivals, including Cinematexas; Media City Film and Video Festival, Windsor; International Short Film Festival Oberhausen; European Media Art Festival, Osnabrück; New York Film Festival; Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival, Chicago and International Film Festival Rotterdam.

Jasmina cibic Nada: Act I

Vidéo | hdv | couleur | 10:9 | Royaume-Uni | 2016

Jasmina Cibic’s film trilogy NADA draws parallels between the construction of national culture and its use-value for political aims. The first chapter Nada: Act I fans out from a biographical thread of architect and artist Vjenceslav Richter, one of the key figures in charge of the visual representation of the Yugoslav state and his first and unrealized design for the Yugoslav Pavilion at the 1958 EXPO in Brussels.
Cibic traced this architecture through archives and recreated the pavilion’s initial design as a musical instrument. In the film, a violinist constructs and continually tunes the instrument according to the Miraculous Mandarin, a musical composition for ballet written by Béla Bartók. This artwork was the one chosen to represent Yugoslavia at the most important dates of the pavilion itself – its National Days – whose role was to maximise the attention and the number of visitors. Paradoxically, this work was since its conception in 1917 marred by state censorship due to its explicit subject matter: a plot of a prostitute, her pimps and the client – roles which Cibic recasts in the following chapters of Nada into characters of Mother Nation, politicians and the artist in charge of national presentation.

“Turo” is a film exploring post-Soviet geography and Constructivist architecture. It is made up four chapters and an introduction-index. Each chapter is exploring a different Constructivist building as a stage for past utopias. The buildings are landmarks of Soviet modernism: Melnikov House (architect Konstantin Melnikov), Narkomfin Building (architect Moisei Ginzburg), ZIL (Automobile factory designed by Vesnin brothers) and also recording of a “ghost mode” of a video game exploring ruins of Pripyat’ (Soviet town affected by Chernobyl catastrophe) featuring unrealized Tatlin’s Tower. Since a lot of Constructivist projects were never realized and existed as potential designs, they are placed into the virtual environments of the video game, positioning utopia within dystopia. It’s an atemporal collective territory, where past dreams coincide with current consumer culture. Modernity could be interpreted as an updated Babel Tower project where the universal tongue would have been imposed over the rest of the world. It still resonates deeply with contemporary culture, but today it exists as an archive of ruins, the record of fragmentation.
Exploring various methods of representation the video’s structure combines cinematic approach with layering and digital abstraction. Each part of the film is a metaphorical tower that gets deconstructed throughout the duration of the chapter. Some parts are direct cinematic narratives, like an enormous blaze, while others show use projected images, deconstruction of an image and shaping its potential meanings on the basis of technological reproduction.

Anton Ginzburg is a New York–based artist and filmmaker who uses an array of historical and cultural references as starting points for his investigations into art’s capacity to penetrate layers of the past and reflect on the contemporary experience. Born in 1974 in Saint Petersburg, Russia, Ginzburg received a classical arts education before immigrating to the United States in 1990. He earned a BFA from Parsons The New School for Design and MFA degree from Bard College (Milton Avery Graduate School). His art has been shown at the 54th Venice Biennale, Blaffer Art Museum, Lille3000, Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, White Columns, the first and second Moscow Biennales, and the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. Screenings included IFFR, NYFF/Projections, Les Rencontres Internationales Moscow International Film Festival, Arkipel/Jakarta, Exis/Korea and Images/Toronto.

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On the banks of Lake Garda Aglaia Konrad films a modernist villa built in 1958 by Vittoriano Vigano for André Bloc. Laurence Bonvin explores the city of Abidjan through a selection of its state architecture. She focuses on contemporary uses of these buildings, and on the future of this post-colonial heritage. Arianne Olthaar traverses an ancient former hotel in the former Soviet bloc, a symbol of bygone luxury. Jasmina Cibic recreates the Yugoslavian pavilion at the Universal Exhibition in 1958, still at project stage. It appears here in the form of an instrument, on which a violinist plays ‘The Miraculous Mandarin‘, composed by Béla Bartók. Anton Ginzburg explores post-Sovietic geography and constructivist architecture, and recreates timeless virtual landscapes like scenes of former utopias.